This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?

I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.

A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:

-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use

-Will not self-host an open-source model

-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker

Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!

I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.

I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.

If not now, when?

Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.